the tweney review

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from May 2nd through May 6th:

• Signing Off, And What Does A TechCrunch Writer Actually Use? - Great collection of tool recommendations. I agree with most of Duncan’s suggestions, though I haven’t tried Evernote, Things, or Skitch — but I will, now
• Webby Award Winners - Wired.com wins a Webby for “Best Copy/Writing”
• Microsoft?s Shopping List - Sramana Mitra on Strategy - Some interesting suggestions about what Microsoft should acquire instead of Yahoo: LinkedIn, Shutterfly, Kayak, Hi5 and a few others. Total bill: $6 billion according to this guy’s estimates.
• WordPress ? Support » RSS widget and Google reader shared items - WP 2.5’s RSS widget does not work with RSS feeds from Google reader. This workaround requires modifying WP’s base code, unfortunately
• Marc?s Voice » Blog Archive » Decentralized Twitter’s time has come - People are upset about Twitter outages. So they want a decentralized, DNS-like replacement. My question: Do you really care about Twitter that much?
• A personalized preview of Grand Theft Auto IV, the big video game of 2008 » VentureBeat - Dean Takahashi’s thoughtful first impressions of GTA IV. Nicely done preview of a game that’s sure to be controversial
• How the Brain Learns to Read - Science Journal - WSJ.com - The brain works very differently when reading different writing systems, eg. Latin alphabet vs Chinese characters

These are a few things I found interesting on May 1st:

• The Next CNet - Joel Johnson - Interesting idea from Joel for a crowdsourced gadget info database
• Autopia Biofuels - Biodiesel filling station located in San Mateo, CA
• Paul Kedrosky: Age and the Entrepreneur - Average age of U.S. tech entrepreneurs? 39. Yeah, it shocked me too. Turns out I’m not too old to start a company after all!
• Scientists Create First Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - Spiffy R&D news. In addition to resistors, inductors and capacitors, scientists now have components that change resistance based on how much current has flowed through them.
• Carlyle, “Mechanical Age” - Writing in 1829, around the time Babbage was starting to design his Difference Engines: “It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word”

These are a few things I found interesting on April 30th:

• WordPress Plugins | alexking.org - some good plugins here, including a “most popular posts” one
• Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source - “This, is an unsettling trend”
• blog.pmarca.com: If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo - good analysis of what’s likely to happen, and how
• Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding | Technology | guardian.co.uk - good, quick advice from Doctorow
• The Right Mailing List Script For WordPress - WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing - Nice, somewhat dated survey of options for integrating an email list with a WP blog
• all things dylan tweney - Just in case you felt like keeping track of everything I publish on Wired.com, my website, and Flickr, here’s a Yahoo pipe I built last year that does just that

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 27th through April 29th:

• SarahLacy.com: Once Delicious, Now Stale - Is Yahoo screwing up del.icio.us, Flickr and other acquisitions by failing to upgrade them?
• Gallery Of The World’s Power Sockets | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - quite handy photo gallery of international power sockets, so you know what you’ll need to plug into. From Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel
• HotWired: Intelligent Agent - “The Birth of Way New Journalism” by Josh Quittner - Quittner’s “Way New Journalism” predates the phrase “open source journalism” by about 4 years, but is basically the same idea
• PressThink: Okay, Ready? My Coordinates for a Successful News Site - Jay Rosen’s Lessons and links for SABEW workshop, April 27, 2008.
• Bowling 1, Health Care 0 - New York Times - Elizabeth Edwards to the news media: “Do your job, so the voters can do theirs”

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 24th through April 25th:

• The INQUIRER Guide to spelLing - The INQUIRER - “… when a company thinks it’s really big and clever to call a product the ‘cOmpuTer’, we change it to ‘Computer’ out of respect for the language of Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer and Magee.”
• Erin McKean - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - McKean’s Law is one of the alternative names for Skitt’s law: “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.”
• Clouds (Ftrain.com) -
• The State of the Telecosm - George Gilder was right after all
• Invention of the Day #496: Exosoles - After reading my post about the benefits of going barefoot, this guy came up with an idea: Disposable, stick-on protective soles for your bare feet.

These are a few things I found interesting on April 22nd:

• Google Transit - plan trips using public transportation & Google maps
• What is Mind Mapping? (and How to Get Started Immediately) - I used mind maps to take class notes from 9th grade to about 11th grade. I took a lot of shit for it, too, from teachers and classmates alike
• 511.org - Bicycling - Bay Area Bicycle Maps - more bike maps, for SF Bay Area residents
• Bike Trails, Paths & Routes From Over 40 Countries at Bikely.com - Find a route, look at it onscreen, or download a .gpx file to your handlebar-mounted GPS unit
• Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm - Profile of Piotr Wozniak, creator of the “SuperMemo” software for enhancing memory. Echoes techniques developed by my wife’s grandfather for his Ed.D. in probably the 1940s or 1950s — though he used index cards
• What is the Learning Curve? - Brilliant, funny explanation for those who dimly sling around the term “learning curve” without thinking about it

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 16th through April 21st:

• 10-3-07 // Online Exclusive: City Slickers - urban bikes
• Dirt Rag {Print Rag} - Review of Kona Paddy Wagon - another relatively inexpensive single-speed, lightweight bicycle
• Dirt Rag {Print Rag} - Review of Redline 925 - One inexpensive, lightweight single-speed bike
• Cartman Berates Your Flash-less Ass | Compiler from Wired.com - “Get Flash, you stupid hippie!” More error messages should feature South Park characters, I think
• Love Your Idea (Don’t Want to Finance It) - New York Times -

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 14th through April 15th:

• Raoul Wallenberg and the Rescue of Jews in Budapest - Amazing story about a Swedish businessman who saved 10,000’s of Hungarian Jews — as many as 100,000, I have been told
• Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D - Extreme digitization: 39 megapixel images, plus high-res 3D maps of each page
• Inside Seagate’s R&D Labs - A peek at how hard drive storage continues to climb
• Justin.tv Blog: The Justin.tv Story: Year 1 - stats on the first year of Justin.tv’s lifecasting business
• Funes, the Memorious - By Jorge Luis Borges - Athenaeum Library of Philosophy - Borges’ very short story about a man who can’t forget anything

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 10th through April 11th:

• Dept. of Technology: Remember This?: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker -
• what-may-happen-in-2000-large.jpg (JPEG Image, 1108×1600 pixels) - What may happen in the next 100 years? Ladies Home Journal predictions from about 100 years ago
• The Magical Minimalism of Microformats - Open - Code - New York Times Blog - nice explanation / summary
• Algorithms Are Terrific. But to Search Smarter, Find a Person - Mahalo, Squidoo, Brijit, ChaCha and others aim to solve search problems by recruiting human help
• Map: Broadband Service Available Worldwide, But Few Can Afford It -
• Eye-Fi: How One Little Chip Will Change the Way You Share Pictures - also search for “eye-fi” on wired.com to see our review of this little 2GB SD card/Wi-fi adapter
• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business - Chris Anderson’s article on the importance of giving it away
• Microsoft Windows Media - Understanding HD Formats - It takes about 44GB to store one hour of compressed HD video using the HD-DVCPRO format

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 8th through April 9th:

• BMWSportTouring Forums: Space Shuttle Processing: Rarely seen by the general public - nice slide show of Space Shuttle assembly & launch
• Gmaps Pedometer - Bay to Breakers Route - Rough map of the Bay to Breakers course on May 18, including an elevation profile
• Texans Build World’s Most Powerful Laser | Wired Science from Wired.com - Awesome, “Back to the Future”-like photos of a petawatt laser, with a great explanation of how it works
• Author Probes Sex-Obsessed Scientists in ‘Bonk’ - Q&A with Mary Roach. Fun fact from Kinsey’s research: “when cheese crumbs are spread before a pair of copulating rats, it distracts the female but not the male.”
• Webby Honorees include GadgetLab on Wired.com - And sister blog Epicenter takes a Honoree award in the “Business Blog” category
• Royal Pingdom » The history of computer data storage, in pictures - very nice pictorial history of early data storage tech